On March 12, a man and a woman sat down for a meal at Save On Meats Diner.

This was before the childish theft of the restaurant’s sandwich board made the news, and before the stolen sandwich board made its hostage-like reappearance on an anarchist website. The manifestos of poverty activists about “gentrification” in the Downtown Eastside had yet to be uttered.

The man and woman had eaten at the diner before. He looked to be in his late 40s; she was in her 20s. She was blond, slim and, in the words of Save On Meats manager Jason Corbett, appeared to be “having a tough go of things.”

They ate quietly. While they were eating, the young woman asked her server for a pen and paper. When she and the man left, on the table was a letter. The server read it. Then, with tears in her eyes, she brought it to Corbett.

This is some of what the young woman wrote:

“To Save On Meets (sic)

“I would just like to express my gratitude for the way the staff at Save On Meets continually help people who are in need, without judgment or even hesitation ... I personally have been so greatful (sic) to all Save On Meets employees for being a place where I’m able to go on days when I’m almost ready to snap ... its usually on cold rainy days when I’m feeling unwell, have no way to get money, need desperately to eat and feeling very unloved and hopeless ...

“There is a very good vibe here that always cheers me up, that means the world to anyone down here who’s being treated like they don’t belong anywhere and feel so hopeless because there’s nowhere to go where they won’t be ridiculed ...

“I know there was honestly a time which my life was most likely going to have ended that day had I not walked up to the window at the front, broke and extremely hungry and feeling very hopeless and unwanted. My instinct was to keep walking as I passed the front window but when I saw the food, my empty stomach forced me to stop. I didn’t really think it would be a good experience for me to ask if there was a possibility of a free bite to eat ... my self respect couldn’t take being denied again ... but I wasn’t denied. To my surprise they were kind to me, talked to me like I was anybody else they’d serve and they gave me something to eat free. That 15 minutes restored my hope, and my will to live came back as I also got to dry off and curb my hunger!”

She signed it “Thank You — Melinda” and drew a heart beside her name.

Corbett read the letter and, as he wrote in an email to me, “welled up, too.”

“That’s when I took a picture of it and sent it to all the staff. I’m pretty sure it had the same effect on everyone.”

It’s important to know that I learned about the letter not from Corbett or from Mark Brand, the owner of Save-On-Meats, but from a server I know personally, and who had mentioned it to me in an earlier conversation. To get the letter, I had to phone Corbett at home, where he was sick in bed. He was surprised I would want it.

I wanted it so that I might bring another voice to the conversation. In the last couple of days, we have listened to poverty activists go on about the gentrification of the Downtown Eastside.

Save On Meats, undeservedly, has been a target in this. No business could be more community-minded. It tries to hire neighbourhood residents and the disabled, it runs a sandwich token program in which patrons can buy meals for those in need, it donates food and services to various agencies, including a food bank and a treatment centre for women.

Yet in a news story about gentrification, Sun city reporter Jeff Lee quoted Ivan Drury of the grandly-titled Carnegie Community Action Plan as seeing Save On Meats owner Brand “as doing ‘Dickensian charity work’ that (Drury) thinks is best left to government.”

“‘This Save On Meats scheme,’” Lee quoted Drury as saying, “‘is socially irresponsible because it is posing an alternative to taxing corporations and the rich … to provide social programs.’”

Aside from the fact that the form of enlightened philanthropy and community engagement Save-On-Meats practises could hardly be called Dickensian — has Drury read Dickens? — one wonders what evidence he has that suggests it could supplant traditional government involvement or, for that matter, the grad-school Marxism he envisions.

Subsidized social housing of all kinds in the Downtown Eastside hasn’t decreased in the last 20 years; it’s increased, and continues to do so. The neighbourhood is still the ravenous maw of tax dollars it always has been, and there are no signs of its appetite waning.

Is gentrification taking place? Without doubt — though in a neighbourhood as destitute as the Downtown Eastside, it would be fairer to call it urban renewal. Yet the city and provincial governments have worked to make that change as inclusive as possible, accommodating both the longtime residents and the inevitable change all neighbourhoods undergo.

In this, Save On Meats is undeniably a part of that change, and thank goodness. The neighbourhood is lucky to have it.

For one woman, at least, it was not Dickensian charity it dispensed, but dignity.

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